Game Details

My first encounter with a prostitute came roughly 13 hours into Grand Theft Auto V. I wouldn't say I was actively seeking one out, but knowing how much GTA's "hooker-killing" reputation precedes it in some corners, I was definitely on alert. I shrugged my shoulders before hitting up a few seedy streets and honking my car at some ladies to no sleazy effect.

Her eventual appearance came in relatively typical GTA fashion. I'd been hired to do some dirty work—in this case, to take out a fast-living tech magnate, one who normally hides behind a beefy security detail. He had a soft spot for a particular woman, so I staked out the warehouse district until she rolled up in a drop-top pseudo-Caddy and hopped in his ride.

My tires squealed, my machine gun popped, and before you knew it my mission was complete. The whole scene reinforced the series' central bloodlust, not to mention its core gameplay loop of fetching cargo, chasing crooks, and offing perps throughout an enormous, open city.

But this scene was notably different because the escort I picked up wasn't the target—not of violence, not of derogatory language, and not of an exploitative, button-mashing sexcapade. In fact, the way GTA V treats its female characters in general is a marked departure from other entries in gaming's most controversial blockbuster.

That's not to say that the game excels in, say, championing strong female characters (the virtual city of Los Santos is certainly a man's world). Rockstar also doesn't single-handedly revolutionize the way GTA V unfolds compared to its predecessors. But this game is ripe with small advancements and evolutions that add some newfound smarts to this gangster's paradise. That's good news for a franchise that often seems wedded to core mechanics that haven't remained static for over a decade now.

Three characters, one unforgettable

Welcome to Los Santos, a virtual facsimile of Los Angeles whose size and density is hard to overstate. The core city chunk doesn't feel quite as giant as GTA IV's Liberty City, but their sheer heft is comparable. It's the home of the game's first two protagonists: Michael, a retired gangster whose wife and kids are as unlikeable and bratty as they come; and Franklin, a streetwise crook who's currently bored with his gig as an automotive repo man.

Michael and Franklin occupy opposite ends of the main city zone of Los Santos, and the introductory chunk of the campaign sees their lives of crime intertwine even while a giant chunk of the game map remains blurred and inaccessible. Eventually, the duo pulls an impressive heist, and they catch the attention of a third protagonist, Trevor, smack in the middle of that fog of war.

A stuttering beauty

Just as GTA IV rebuilt New York City in impressive fashion, GTA V paints LA in beautiful tones befitting California's sunny skies and expansive vistas. The game simply requires more horsepower than New York's clustered streets did, but the engine holds up well, even on aging current-generation console hardware.

No current-gen open-world console game offers more beautiful views or more drastic lighting effects with such insane draw distances. GTA V is unparalleled in delivering such mouth-watering sunsets or midnight views of glimmering bridge lights on the rivers below. And the game does all this while juggling a larger variety of on-screen cars, with higher-polygon models, than GTA IV ever did.

At least on the PlayStation 3 version I tried, though, the price for all this beauty is paid in framerate dips, messy anti-aliasing, ridiculous texture pop-in, and a reduction from the box's advertised "720p" resolution. A new version of the game on next-gen consoles or the PC would no doubt fix these issues and really set mouths drooling. As it is, Rockstar should be commended for duct-taping this mix of details and sacrifices while keeping the framerate tolerable and the glitch count to a minimum.

Trevor, without a doubt, is the series' most captivating anti-hero yet. The meth magnate lives in a trailer park in one of Los Santos' distant deserts, and he's best described as a torrid mess of regret, anger, and fearlessness wrapped around a chewy, surprisingly moral center, all with a sprinkling of angel dust on top.

Let me try to illustrate this odd mix of personality traits. During one mission, one of Trevor's meth-lab cohorts insults a woman, so Trevor starts screaming at the top of his lungs: "You called her a bitch?! Ain't you got a mother?" This provides a nice contrast with the previous scenes, where Trevor stomped a rival biker's skull into the ground and tossed a few foreign businessmen into a freezer to hide them while he murders drug-dealing rivals. Between details like the "CUT HERE" dotted-line tattoo on his throat or his history of dishonorable military discharge, Trevor would make any scriptwriter starry-eyed.

Sadly, the character's dark humor and unpredictability make the other protagonists look downright boring by comparison. Michael's retired-gangster insecurities are a bit ho-hum in a post-Sopranos world, while Franklin's status as a novice pushover doesn't evolve very much. If anything, he mostly serves as a foil for other white characters' veiled racism. (Get ready for a lot of awkward uses of the word "homie.")

Still, the other two player-characters play nicely off Trevor's insanity, each one goading the other in surprising ways. At one point, Michael points to Trevor's fashion sense, filthiness, and general abstinence from popular culture as evidence that the meth-lord is actually a hipster. At another, Franklin has to play the vice principal role and shut the other two up as they fight about their convoluted history.

In general, GTA V's plot suffers from a few navel-gazey stretches and some particularly dated ruminations on topics like Facebook, American Idol, Blackwater, and border security. Perhaps that stuff seemed fresher when the game started its development years ago. Otherwise, the criss-cross of characters and archetypes veers away from gangster-movie clichés whenever possible. The script does a better job of respecting and satirizing its targets in turn than previous games in the series, and the voice acting for all characters is top-notch. Trevor alone makes this story worth riding GTA V's full wave.

Tighter controls, hit-and-miss missions

Sadly Trevor takes a little too long to arrive—almost four hours into the campaign—but he comes along with a giant expanse of open desert access on the map, as well as access to airborne vehicles like planes and helicopters. (You'll need these to traverse Los Santos' mountainous expanses.) And after a glut of city-block missions, tearing through these mountains and deserts, especially in off-road vehicles, feels like being freed from confinement. These woodsy, hill-coated zones are sure to draw gleeful comparisons to another Rockstar open-world adventure: Red Dead Redemption.

Operating vehicles and machinery of all sorts, by and large, feels much smoother this go-round. While GTA IV saw the series experiment with a full-on physics system for its cars, this sequel feels so much smoother and more elegant to drive around in. Sports cars, sedans, motorcycles, dune buggies, and helicopters all share a nice balance of speed, weight, and mobility. They've all been tweaked to emphasize control over realism, too, so that players can spend less time fretting about spinouts and other twitchy annoyances during missions and more time focusing on peeling out.

Gunplay doesn't feel quite as improved, but it's easier than ever to stick to cover and auto-target bad guys. If anything, this oversimplification will rile up old fans used to more free-form shooting. Don't worry; the few missions that require annoyingly precise aiming and sniping, especially on fast-moving targets like planes, should silence those traditionalists.

Now I only wish the local sellers (read: Smugglers) here in Pakistan didn't charge $80 for the standard edition ps3 disc.

$80, Consider yourself and your country on the lucky side, here in Venezuela costs $381; , and the saddest part is that i will get it ASAP, because due currency conversions issues, the price always goes up.

but can i do nothing in the game (towards the game progression) and have it still be fun?...

that is what is important about GTA...

does not matter,i love the game... i have bought all of the GTA games multiple times, on steam, and because the disks got scratched... so i will be buying it... going to see if a can get a SONY PS3 gtaV bundle... (have a feeling it will be sold out... so i will be getting the game in any case)

Unrelated to the game: is this article's link from the main page somehow different from others? I ask because I could not middle-click it in Chrome and have it open in a new tab. It treated the click like a left click. I was able to select right-click->open in new tab and that worked. Every other link I can middle click and have it start a new tab.

Nice review. Seems like a balanced assessment. It's too bad they still feel the need to pad the mainline missions with tedious side missions. As a player, I don't particuarly mind some relatively easy and simple missions that pad out the game, so long as the mechanics/goals/settings of those missions are constantly changed up. But doing the same tedious side mission over and over is just so inexcusable in 2013.

It's also nice to hear that the shooting is somewhat improved. I personally don't even care if there's an auto-aimed "press A to kill" gunplay mechanic. These games are so long (and some individual missions so long) that I would welcome the ability to just rip through it.

One question Sam - is there still a "run" button? Or have they finally moved on to run/walk on the joystick? You know, like most games started doing in the late 90s...

And on that note - last line of the first section:

"That's good news for a franchise that often seems wedded to core mechanics that haven't remained static for over a decade now."

Unrelated to the game: is this article's link from the main page somehow different from others? I ask because I could not middle-click it in Chrome and have it open in a new tab. It treated the click like a left click. I was able to select right-click->open in new tab and that worked. Every other link I can middle click and have it start a new tab.

I've had the same issue with a couple articles on Ars...Most work but some don't with the middle-click.

From the previews I saw, it really looked like Rockstar drew from the latest Max Payne to improve the shooting system. Care to comment on that? Or did you not play the latest Max Payne?

I actually like it when game developers homogenize their games somewhat. Ubisoft seems to be doing it. Farcry 3 was a 1st person AssCreed. Watch Dogs looks like AssCreed with hacking. Splinter Cell has AssCreed-style climbing.

Rockstar seems to draw from RDR and Max Payne for this latest GTA, and I think that's a good thing. Share the assets that work. Let players that are already familiar with those mechanics experience them in a different environment.

One thing I really love about the GTA games is the life of the world. Just the sheer amount of random dialog by strangers always has me chuckling. Just one example from GTA 4: sometimes a guy on the street will blurt out "Cheesy vagina!"

All I want to know is can you check traffic before pulling out of an intersection? Midnight Club: LA let you swing the in-car first-person camera from side-to-side so that you didn't blunder into vehicles and recentered when you released the Right Thumbstick. Without this one thing my driving pleasure will be scuppered.

Unrelated to the game: is this article's link from the main page somehow different from others? I ask because I could not middle-click it in Chrome and have it open in a new tab. It treated the click like a left click. I was able to select right-click->open in new tab and that worked. Every other link I can middle click and have it start a new tab.

I've had the same issue with a couple articles on Ars...Most work but some don't with the middle-click.

I have the same issue with Ctrl+click. The Linux article that's currently on the front page won't open in a new tab either.

Whelp, looks like after work this week, and also this weekend is going to full of GTA V provided i'm not called into work, sometimes military life makes gaming harder to accomplish. That being said, I'm glad they made the side missions optional this time. I never completed GTA IV because of that reason.

Unrelated to the game: is this article's link from the main page somehow different from others? I ask because I could not middle-click it in Chrome and have it open in a new tab. It treated the click like a left click. I was able to select right-click->open in new tab and that worked. Every other link I can middle click and have it start a new tab.

I noticed this behaviour too, really annoying having an article steal the tab like that.

Also, what kind of moron downvotes a post that simply points out a technical glitch?

At least on the PlayStation 3 version I tried, though, the price for all this beauty is paid in framerate dips, messy anti-aliasing, ridiculous texture pop-in, and a reduction from the box's advertised "720p" resolution.

I am not interested in a fanboy rant from anyone about the relative strengths and weaknesses of the competing current-gen systems. But since I have the other one, I'm curious as to whether anyone has seen any information on how the game is running on the 360.

At least on the PlayStation 3 version I tried, though, the price for all this beauty is paid in framerate dips, messy anti-aliasing, ridiculous texture pop-in, and a reduction from the box's advertised "720p" resolution.

I am not interested in a fanboy rant from anyone about the relative strengths and weaknesses of the competing current-gen systems. But since I have the other one, I'm curious as to whether anyone has seen any information on how the game is running on the 360.

in the past rockstar games have been technically better on the 360.why? no idea. would guess it shows where the company puts most of its effort.

At least on the PlayStation 3 version I tried, though, the price for all this beauty is paid in framerate dips, messy anti-aliasing, ridiculous texture pop-in, and a reduction from the box's advertised "720p" resolution.

I am not interested in a fanboy rant from anyone about the relative strengths and weaknesses of the competing current-gen systems. But since I have the other one, I'm curious as to whether anyone has seen any information on how the game is running on the 360.

Give it a few days and Eurogamer's Digital Foundry will do a detailed (probably overly so) breakdown comparing the two versions.

Also, just for the Arsians who are PC gamers but don't follow this stuff - No PC or next-gen version of the game has been announced, however, apparently leaked copies of the game contains at least some code that references PC and "obris" - the project codename for the PS4. No references were found for an XB1 version, so far as I know. Take all of this with a grain of salt.

I'm glad they fixed the driving. I put an hour into GTA 4 on PC before I quit because I couldn't turn a corner without coming to a stop.

The driving in IV was awesome! Only reason I bought the game. Most other games pivot on a center point or feel like you are on rails. So why copy what every other game offers? If that is what you are looking for then you have plenty of options.

Unrelated to the game: is this article's link from the main page somehow different from others? I ask because I could not middle-click it in Chrome and have it open in a new tab. It treated the click like a left click. I was able to select right-click->open in new tab and that worked. Every other link I can middle click and have it start a new tab.

That's a fun bug in chrome. I've tried to find info on it multiple times without success. Ctrl-click only works some of the time.

I'm glad they fixed the driving. I put an hour into GTA 4 on PC before I quit because I couldn't turn a corner without coming to a stop.

The driving in IV was awesome! Only reason I bought the game. Most other games pivot on a center point or feel like you are on rails. So why copy what every other game offers? If that is what you are looking for then you have plenty of options.

oq

I admit it was a stark opposite to the "look at me I'm driving sideways tralalala" 'physics' of Saints Row, but that's like saying your vanilla is extreme because it's not "Xtreme SHOCKolate!" (that's probably a registered trademark).

I'm looking forward to this one, as I enjoyed all of GTA4, up until the point where the arcane ("realistic"?) helicopter controls made me dump the game. Coming primed with all the expectations that SR2, 3, 4 (which I've recently replayed, or played for the first time), I'm sure to have a delightful Sandbox experience. (Yes, I know they're different games. I'm just hoping to cause trollrage in the people that hate SR3/4.)

Also, having never seen an episode of the Sopranos, I expect to have two memorable characters to look forward to, all the while being able to identify as the idiot everyone makes fun of.

However, NOMSadface. Don't have a console. Going to wait for however long until the PC version comes out.

I find it interesting that I've come across diametrically opposed views on Trevor as a character in various reviews.

In this one it's all about Trevor couldn't have come along soon enough and is surprisingly complex and another how he is utterly unlikeable and crashes into the story like a wrecking ball and totally blows some interesting developing character dynamics and storylines out of the water.

I'm glad they fixed the driving. I put an hour into GTA 4 on PC before I quit because I couldn't turn a corner without coming to a stop.

And I thought it only sucked on the PS3. Managed to near the ending missions after 3 yrs of off and on play sessions.

I really only found the motorcycles in GTA IV to have crappy driving controls. That one mission where Rockstar set you up to chase one of The Lost using a motorcycle was really annoying until I said screw the motorcycle set up a car before starting the mission.

Strangely enough, The Lost and the Damned expansion seemed to fix the motorcycles... or rather the choppers, which were much more stable in a corner.

Huge GTA fan, but was disappointed with IV. I tried Saints Row 3 and had a blast, being completely over-the-top. I've been playing Saints Row 4 for the past few weeks and haven't been as impressed. Fingers crossed they swapped places for me this time around and that I like V more than IV.

Good to hear the driving's been "fixed". Aside from what I felt was very muted colors, GTA 4's driving mechanics put me off almost immediately and after about 5 hours I haven't picked it up again since.

Now I only wish the local sellers (read: Smugglers) here in Pakistan didn't charge $80 for the standard edition ps3 disc.

$80, Consider yourself and your country on the lucky side, here in Venezuela costs $381; , and the saddest part is that i will get it ASAP, because due currency conversions issues, the price always goes up.

WOW, never would I ever pay that much for a game regardless of how much I like it; nevertheless, I have a lot of respect if you truly will follow up with your actions as that would clearly demonstrate your love for the medium and Rockstar.

I know some people for a very long time until the most recent Humble Bundles were only giving $.10 for 5-8 games that used to go for $60 each at one point *sigh*

Now I only wish the local sellers (read: Smugglers) here in Pakistan didn't charge $80 for the standard edition ps3 disc.

$80, Consider yourself and your country on the lucky side, here in Venezuela costs $381; , and the saddest part is that i will get it ASAP, because due currency conversions issues, the price always goes up.

WOW, never would I ever pay that much for a game regardless of how much I like it; nevertheless, I have a lot of respect if you truly will follow up with your actions as that would clearly demonstrate your love for the medium and Rockstar.

I know some people for a very long time until the most recent Humble Bundles were only giving $.10 for 5-8 games that used to go for $60 each at one point *sigh*

Well, certainly i love this industry and i want to support it the best and most i can, but really here is an investment situation, take for instance last year ( december) a 60$ game did cost here 210$, now is 381$, chances are that next year will cost 480$, therefore if i wait to get it, i will end up paying more, so i look it as an investment because i will save money down the line, and i will be supporting this industry too.

Sorry, I'm going to have to argue with you a little bit. The load time switching between characters is still long, even with the Google Earth style zoom in/out. On the PS3 anyways. Not that far into yet though so I don't really have to switch to often. If you like any of the previous GTA's, you are going to like this one. If you don't like earlier versions, this probably isn't going to change your mind. I noticed texture pop-in when I first started playing the game, but after getting into it and playing the missions, I barely notice it. It would be nice if the frame rate was a little higher, but I understand there is only so much that can be happening at a time, and there is a lot of stuff going on. Can't wait to ditch work and get back to playing! :-)

I am not interested in a fanboy rant from anyone about the relative strengths and weaknesses of the competing current-gen systems. But since I have the other one, I'm curious as to whether anyone has seen any information on how the game is running on the 360.

A friend got his through Amazon UK's incredible unadvertised Saturday-before-official-release-date delivery and didn't feel like anything technical was holding him back from enjoying the game.

[quote="Chuck Knucka"One thing I really love about the GTA games is the life of the world. Just the sheer amount of random dialog by strangers always has me chuckling. Just one example from GTA 4: sometimes a guy on the street will blurt out "Cheesy vagina!"[/quote]

The one that always got me was the gang members in GTAIII calling out "Burrito!". Any time someone in the office suggests one for lunch, all I can think of is hauling someone out of their car and driving off.